CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DEGREE OF GRADE IN GRADE-ADDED ROUGH SET FOR LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION

Abstract. This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the membership which is produced as by-products of land cover classification by Grade-added rough set (GRS). A new land cover classification method by using GRS was developed. The classification scheme of GRS which calculates membership (degree of grade) for each class is similar to those of MLC and SVM. But there are two things that are not clear. One is a meaning of the membership of GRS and the other is a reason why the larger membership in GRS employed works well. In this study, aerial images were used to visualize the relation of membership between GRS and existing classifiers, MLC and SVM. Furthermore, a model experiment in two-dimensional feature space was conducted. From these experiments, it was found that the meaning of degree of grade is a distance from a nearest training data of other class. That is, the meaning of membership of GRS is similar to that of SVM, because SVM also calculates a distance from boundary line which is determined by support vectors, while the meaning of membership of MLC is a distance from a centroid of own class. Also it was found that what the distance from the closest other class is given as the degree of grade implies that the higher the grade, the higher the certainty. In this research we could clarify some of the features of land cover classification using GRS.